The human brain is very different from a conventional digital computer. It relies on massive parallelism rather than raw speed and it stores long-term knowledge by modifying the way its processing elements interact rather than by setting bits in a passive, general purpose memory. It is robust against minor physical damage and it learns from experience instead of being explicitly programmed. We do not yet know how the brain uses the activities of neurons to represent complex, articulated structures, or how the perceptual system turns the raw input into useful internal representations so rapidly. Nor do we know how the brain learns new representational schemes. But over the past few years there have been a lot of new and interesting theories about these issues. Much of the theorizing has been motivated by the belief that the brain is using computational principles which could also be applied to massively parallel artificial systems, if only we knew what the principles were.

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